Tag: Algeria

It’s been a while since Western liberals have been able to cheer a victory. Emmanuel Macron has given them what they needed. He has triumphed over Marine Le Pen with more than 66% of the vote behind him. After Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, the liberals feared that France would fall next as if politics were just a series of trending hashtags. (More…)

On September 11th, the War on Terror will turn 15. Some would argue that it is in fact much older. Without a doubt, it has now outlasted WWII by a decade. Given how much that conflict transformed Europe, God forbid what this war has done to it. (More…)

But the war goes on; and we will have to bind up for years to come the many, sometimes ineffaceable, wounds that the colonialist onslaught has inflicted on our people. That imperialism which today is fighting against a true liberation of mankind leaves in its wake here and there fissures of decay which we must search out and mercilessly expel from our land and our spirits. (More…)

Camus’ writings deal intensely with the problem of death; suicide in Myth of Sisyphus (1943), and the death of others in L’Homme Révolté(1951). For Camus, the issue is that humans have no direct experience of death, but it remains their only certainty, and shapes their existence. (More…)

In the very interesting account which Mrs. Devereux Roy has given of the present condition of Algeria, she says that France “is now about to embark upon a radical change of policy in regard to her African colonies.” (More…)

“You want to cut hands? Here are two! Cut them!” So dares a fishmonger to the occupiers of her hometown, theatrically presenting the officer leading them with her fileting knife. The scene is one of the most memorable from the Franco-Mauritanian Timbuktu, directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, released in December 2014. (More…)

On a warm summer night several years ago I found myself in a busy internet café on the Karl Marx Strasse in the Neukölln section of Berlin. Neukölln has one of the largest Turkish populations in the city, and rather a bad name both in Berlin, and in Germany more generally. (More…)

Tony Judt, who died in 2010 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, had the quality of an epigone. This is not the case because he was a historian of a stripe very much in retreat from the onslaught of post-structuralist trends since the 1970s. He was also a representative of a humanistic strain of liberalism which had, by the time of his death, long since begun to seem atavistic. (More…)

We Are All Illegal Immigrants. (“Siamo Tutti Clandestini.”) A message of solidarity to illegal migrants, for anyone who has spent time in Italy, the slogan can be as common as the circle A that often accompanies it. Not that it is necessary to impose anarchist branding. So synonymous is this idea with the politics, the symbol risks overkill. (More…)

Few continents have been as lost on the left as Africa. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been openings, however. From the anti-Apartheid movement of the 1980s, to the Arab Spring, there have been plenty of opinions on offer. But, the idea of Africa, as a site of political struggle, between the West, and its inhabitants, is relatively new. That is, to post-Cold War progressive politics. (More…)

“You’re on your own.” Behind all his words of support and friendship, the message Barack Obama delivered in both Jerusalem and Ramallah this week was clear. “Pivot to Asia,” would likely have been its most appropriate title. If only the US President had been that specific. (More…)